This is third installment of my favorite passages
from a newly released book called Let Their Voices Be Heard. The quotes
this month are from the chapter on body image. One of the goals of the book is
to underscore the importance of celebrating body size diversity when we promote
physically active living and healthy, enjoyable eating.

“I’m at peace with [my
weight]. I don’t own a scale. I don’t need numbers to tell me that my body
weight’s okay. I’m just okay with who I am. And I think that when I let go
of worrying about what everybody else thought, that’s when I realized
I’m an okay person, I don’t have to be skinny. I’m healthy and . . . I’m at
peace with that.” Female, late 40's

“I feel blessed to be
able to stand up and look in the mirror and have [a body that] functions and
I think it’s great. I have a good, loving family, friends. What [more]
could you want?” Male in his 50's

“I got to tell you, the
first time you’ve got to go to the big and tall store is a bitch. It is.
That’s a rock your world kind of a deal. Man, am I really that big?”
Male, mid 30's

“I remember as a kid
hating to go shopping ’cause . . . when you’re a size 14 in a size 8 world,
it was miserable. And I still don’t like shopping . . . . But yet, I’ve
accomplished a whole lot of things and gone to school and have a good job,
and I’m well-liked by my clients, . . . but there’s this negative thing
[about being large] always in the background.” Female, early 40's

“[There’s a] mental war
that’s going on in me. . . . I have a brother who . . . is about 200 pounds
overweight . . . and it is very detrimental to his health. And I
just swear to myself that I am not going to end up in that place. . . . [My]
health concerns outweigh the other [body image] concerns right now. . . .
For the first time in my life, . . . I’m just content where I am . . . . [I
have] a unity and feeling of pride in myself. But in that unity [is] also
figuring out what has to change . . . for the goal of . . . being able to go
out and do anything and everything I want to do and not have health
concerns.” Female, early 40's

“I’m unique looking.
Every time people see me, babies cry. You know, the great big huge guy with
all this hair. . . . I was never beautiful by any stretch of the
imagination. I’m just a fat guy. . . . I never was able to make any
friends. . . . I became a loner. Then the overweight thing got worse and
the weight problem became worse. . . . Just sitting home watching TV,
that’s how I spent most of my adolescent years. . . . I was just living in
my own little fantasy world. That hasn’t changed, now that I think about it.
. . . We don’t find [fat] attractive [in our culture]. It isn’t
attractive, at least to me. I don’t want to see it, but then again I’m not
really aware of it in my own case.” Male, late 30's

“I always claim that
when you become heavy you become invisible. You go in a room and you want to
be social with people, [but] . . . you can’t because of [your] size. . . .
You totally become invisible. People don’t recognize you. They don’t know
who you are . . . . There’s a lot of people that even if they do know you,
[they] don’t want to know you because . . . it’s not sociably accepted to
hang out with people that are . . . obese.” Male in his 40's

“Sometimes I feel that
I’m the recipient of that look. That’s all it ever is. It’s just a
look. People are far too polite to say, ‘Hey, can you go drop some pounds,
fatso?’ . . . That is a pretty painful look to get . . . , especially
having dealt it out.” Male, mid 30's

“My little sister . . .
is really tall and skinny, . . . and the boys thought she was an Ethiopian
because she was so skinny, and I’d never really thought of how hard it must
be to be skinny. I mean, everyone knows that it’s pretty hard to be larger,
but I’d never really thought about how hard it was to be skinny.” Female,
early 20's

“You can see a very
attractive person that’s a nice shape, but if you talk to them, you may find
out that they’re very unhappy with the shape of their body. I just have
the attitude that [says] live each day as best you can, as happy as you can,
and try to be as healthy as you can, and let each and every person do the
same thing.” Female in her 60's

“I think different
bodies react differently, but mine is not comfortable being so overweight,
and it was screaming at me to do something.” Female in her 30's

“I never liked my body.
. . , never been able to get it to where I was happy with it, even when I
was young . . . and in really good shape. . . . I started dieting when I
weighed 250, and I dieted myself up to 350. . . . It’s been a real
struggle.” Male in his 60's

“I have a younger
brother. . . . He would eat five times the amount of food that I did. . . .
, and he’s still not heavy. . . . I remember going to a church meeting one
day when I was a kid and the . . . lady turned around and looked at my
mother . . . and said, ‘What do you do, starve one and feed the other one?’
” Male in his 60's

“Being fat turned me
into a bitch. I was the nicest kid that you’ll ever meet in your life, I
was.. . .I started putting on weight, and I started
getting teased, and that teasing stopped quick because I found out I was a
slugger. I was! . . . . [Teasing] turned me mean.” Female, late 20's

“At [age] 63, with a 42
waist and 38 chest, a guy can walk down the street with his bald head and
think he’s looking good. You ask any woman if she gets just a half a pound
past a size 6, ‘Oh I’m fat, I’m fat!’ I’ve lived with that. . . .
That’s why I’m single again.” Male, 70ish

“Medical professionals
can be so insensitive to a person with weight problems. It’s like they are
saying, ‘Why don’t you just diet? Why don’t you have any self-control?’ . .
. He wrote ‘obesity’ in my chart even though I’d lost 40 pounds. These
aren’t tears of sadness, they’re tears of anger. I got a different doctor.”
Female, early 40's

“Sometimes . . . weight
is comfortable. It’s a good shield to have between yourself and other
people. . . . [Extra body weight] is a mental protection.” Female,
early 40's